Climate change hits the campaign trail

Middlebury’s Bill McKibben in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise: “Next month, more than a billion people are expected to watch the huge global warming concerts that Al Gore is staging on every continent. But my guess is that the few dozen young people who recently gathered on a town green in Lebanon, New Hampshire may sway the future at least as much.

“Those college kids were the advance guard of ‘Climate Summer,’ an effort to make global warming a central issue in the next presidential campaign. They will be trailing candidates, canvassing voters and, in early August, marching across the state with thousands of local residents. And in the process they’ll be trying to upend conventional political wisdom, which is that the environment is always a second-tier issue, trailing jobs and health care and foreign policy. It’s a tough sell — but there are real signs that this year may be different on the campaign trail.”